Then I made more subdivisions to add more detail using the Clay, Standard, Slash 2/3 and Magnify or Inflat brushes as preferred tools. I made him with a big torso, huge back and deltoids, using some anatomy and hulk pictures as references.

For the high res detail (five million polygons) I used some organic alphas for the skin and an alpha drawn in Photoshop for the back pattern (Fig.04).

Fig.04

Texturing

I used only ZBrush polypainting for the whole texture process. Starting with a couple of colours and a few variations of tonality, I masked some parts by cavity to add colour detail between the wrinkles and pores to add contrast (Fig.05).

Fig.05

Then I used some organic alphas to make a slightly tonal variation and created a texture 4096x4096 to export. Finally I made a displacement map and normal map in ZBrush and blended in low opacity with the polypainted map in Photoshop. Then I made a high pass filter of the diffuse texture to blend in a low opacity in the normal map to increase texture detail. With that I was able to go back to 3ds Max and make the shaders and lighting (Fig.06).

Fig.06

Shaders and Lighting

I exported the final mesh to 3ds Max at a medium level of subdivision and I added the normal map to a fast skin material. I used mental ray fast skin to simulate the skin shader and Photoshop to create the speculars and subdermal maps using diffuse colour as base (Fig.07 & Fig.08).